was suffused with political struggle of african-americans. i didn't know it at this time. it is quite clear that political struggle dated back to the civil war. my father, as david mentioned, was a black panther in baltimore. the most -- probably the most radical wing of the civil rights black power struggle. my parents met there. had they not met there, i would not be sitting on this panel today. so it is very easy for me to say that in the most subjective way. but i think even more importantly than that, when you think about this in a sort of bigger way, when you think of african-americans, the entire people, what i didn't understand until i started taking this path back into history is that there very much was another option on the table, and that is black people not being here at all, black people being recolonized and leaving for africa or

caribbean or some other part of a yet-determined united states. the fact that not just the slaves were free but that the slaves remained here had incredible consequences for the country. i mean, we can talk about the obvious good when we think about the freedom struggles of various different groups, when we think women, when we think about the current marriage equality levels. all of this stuff dates back to the civil rights movement which itself dates back to the civil war. one of the most stunning things i came across in my very recent study was when you start studying the women's rights movement and you see how many of those folks started out as emancipationists -- i'm sorry -- abolitionists. excuse me. when you hear sarah gremke saying by looking into the rights of slaves i gained deeper insights into my own rights as a woman, that's a mangled quote but basically the essence of what she said. it is impossible for me to picture america as it is today without picturing african-americans as a political

force, without picturing african-americans as a cultural force. where would we be without jazz? what is america without jazz, without its popular music? when you think about these questions that our president is facing right now, why does the majority of republican voters in mississippi regard him as a muslim? i think all of that goes back to the civil war. the difficulty of accepting african-americans as full americans, as full citizens, as full participants in our lecture, and i think that causes a great degree of problems that are not even obvious when you talk about putting in place policy that, you know, presumably is for all of america. but when you see african-americans at the forefront of it, it sort of distorts it in a way that i don't necessarily think it always would. my answer, not to be flip, i hope i'm not being flip, is me. i'm the most important legacy. it all boils down to me.

it is all about me at the end of the day. i think it is the presence of african-americans in the united states. >> okay. john witt. >> i should start by observing that this is the david brian davis lecture was one of the great inspirations for me. as a junior in college right down the way i started thinking about some of these things in a seminar he taught. i am enormously grateful to be here today. thank you. two candidates. we are allowed two. one, and this draws on what we have just been talking about, the legal and constitutional history of the united states since the civil war is organized in large part around the reconstruction amendments and an ongoing battle to decide what the amendments that follow the civil war mean. many of the contests that are candidates for the legacies find

one of their principle forums in the courts and in social movements that are claiming to articulate the true meaning with many different views of what true meaning might be of the reconstruction amendments -- the 13th amendment abolishing slavery, abolishing involuntary servitude, and giving congress the authority to enforce it. the 14th amendment, giving citizens privileges and immunities and giving the congress power to enforce. the 15th amendment, banning discrimination in voting. these are the three transformative constitutional amendments of our legal and constitutional history. and much of what's gone on since then in the law and constitutional law in the supreme court are a series of arguments about those amendments. this is played out in areas like affirmative action, race discrimination, so brown versus board of education and its progeny are the product of this.

but it goes way beyond that. the number of different features of american law that are shaped and cannot be understood otherwise, except through these amendments, it knows no bounds. gun rights, your handgun rights which you now have, you didn't a couple of years ago but now you do, are run through the 14th amendment. there is no connecticut handgun second amendment right absent the 14th amendment, which has been incorporated by rights that were only before the civil war held by individuals as against the federal government. most criminal procedural law is the result of the 14th amendment. the list goes on and on. so this is a huge legacy of the civil war, one that's fought out all the time. just seven years ago -- nine years ago, justice o'connor, former justice o'connor said that she hoped that maybe in about 25 years questions of affirmative action in higher education admission policies might be able to be race blind

as a matter of constitutional mandate. and i think when she said that what she meant was maybe in 25 years from then the battle over the civil war would at last be over. it turns out the supreme court is probably going to end that next year. they just granted certiorari on a case -- >> worried about health care. >> second legacy, the beginning of sustained moral and legal and military deliberations on what it means to be a great power. we see in the lincoln administration for the first time in american history that i'm aware of, sustained thinking and deliberation and debate about what it means to exercise the huge power that comes with an industrialized military force. and this ranges from lincoln's extraordinary just war deliberations in the fall, summer and fall of 1862, to the

elaboration of a code of rules of engagement that purport to be international law, which are still with us today in the international law that we have from the hague conventions and the geneva conventions. and last in the series of a commissions which tried thousands and thousands of people and are right now being argued about in federal courts in washington, d.c., virtually every week. in the coming weeks, the federal district court for -- the federal court of appeals for the district of columbia will decide a case in which the parties are right now arguing about the legacy of the civil war and the question about -- and their central question is whether or not the expansions that lincoln and his administration made in the military authority to take over territory that had once been exclusively the territory of the civil courts ought to be an authority for military commissions for the 21st century. so the legacy of the civil war and these questions about the united states as a military power, moral questions, legal questions, and military strategy

and tactics questions is really palpable as an important part of the conversation, i think. >> wow. you know, i don't need to define a legacy at all. i think we just did. since i forgot to. i am going to go in the order that these were raised and get us all to weigh in on this. andy, your point about how does one understand how americans find compromise, find a middle ground. you reminded me immediately one of the things robert penn warren wrote about 50 years ago right now in his little book, "legacy of the civil war," was that he believed the civil war gave us pragmatism. now, pragmatism may be a little older than the civil war, but his whole point was that this era of such terrible bloody extremes, horrifying extremes, brought about in america and

louie minnon has written about this -- brought about in the next generation at least or even that generation, a philosophical outlook or temperament we have come to call pragmatism, a la william james and others. is that gone? can that kind of thing truly be defeated? we think our current word is "polarization." it is a nice word, isn't it, for political deadlock, political hatred, political civil war. is pragmatism dying now? i mean in the political arena. it may not be among reflective college professors. >> i don't want to take us away from our topic. but it is my hope that we are lumbering unwittingly,

unconsciously, half blindly into some kind of middle ground that we'll find whether we are exactly looking for it or not. that's probably an expression of completely groundless faith. look, you raised so many questions. for me, one of the features of the civil war is that we're mesmerized by it because we can -- we can't imagine death and terror and destruction on such a scale, at least not on the homeland territory. now, in fact, it turns out to have been a preview, a pretty good preview, of the 20th century in some of the ways that have been mentioned. the invention of total war or an ideology based on racial hierarchy versus an ideology at least in theory versus racial dignity. we saw that fought out in the 20th century.

in some ways, one could conceivably make the argument that all of these catastrophes were as a result of the failure of a pragmatic spirit of compromise. we look at the -- the weimar republic collapsed, and we all know what happened after that. so i think one thing that one can gain from a study of the civil war is a sense of what the stakes can be. we are in a moment now where the stakes seem very high to a lot of people. right? we are waiting to see whether the supreme court is going to strike down what i think is a kind of middle way compromise on health care, right? on the one hand, there is a large faction in our country that believes a single-payer system run by the government is the way to go. on the other side, there is a faction that believes the private market is the way to go. what we have is an effort to find some middle ground. it looks like it is going to come apart.

the cost of that, in my view, will be quite high. it won't be on a scale of the cost of the civil war. so studying a world historical event as a number of people at this table have accurately described it and seeing from one perspective what is the cost when the political process doesn't work is a sort of sobering reminder to us of how suddenly catastrophe can sort of sobering reminder to us of how sort of suddenly disaster can sneak up on us. that is not to deny all the positive statements that have been made about the legacies of the civil war. i mean, without it, it wouldn't be the united states. there wouldn't be a united states with free black people in it as a very significant part of the culture. it wouldn't be all of the other things we take for granted. so, in retrospect, it doesn't look like a catastrophe. it looks like a great leap forward. for those in the middle of it, it didn't feel so good would be my suspicion.

>> gary? on this issue, in your book, "union war," you make a forceful case for the fact that millions of northerners fought this war to save the union, the united states. in fact, i've never read a book on the civil war where the term "united states" was used as much. i know you well. it is quite explicit on your part. are you in any way as a thoughtful historian that has to live in the present concerned that there is a death of pragmatism, that belief in union, that the ultimate aim of a cohesive republic is endangered based on, you know, your study of what union meant in the 19th century? do we have a language of union anymore? >> i am not so sure we do have that language of union anymore. another thing we don't have. this plays off what you were

saying. i don't think we have much of a sense of the civil war or anything else in our history. and i think an indication of that is the sort of hysterical treatment of everything that happens now. it's the worst. there has never been anything like this. we have never been as divided as we are now. there has never been a problem with immigration like there is now. the only way you can believe that is if your historical memory goes back to last thursday. because if it goes back very far at all, you know very well that we have been through far more traumatic things than we are going through now. and it would be helpful to have the historical context in mind and equip us better to deal with what we have in front of us now instead of having this armageddon-like view of what's going on. i think that the loyal white population -- the free states were 98.8% white according to the 1860 census. that's something we need to remind ourselves of when we think about the past. the past is a different country in many ways.

demographically it certainly was. they are almost all white. most of them, alas, did not care much about black people. most of them embraced emancipation as a tool to preserve the union, i believe. i think the evidence is very strong on that. but they had a collective sense of what the union meant. i don't think that we have perhaps that strong a sense now. i don't think we should all have a pollyanna notion of what the united states is and stands for. but i think that it helps to have some common sense of what the project is about. i'm not sure we have that when we listen to candidates sometimes. >> rick santorum declared this the most important since 1860 in gettysburg. >> there was a battle there. >> sure, ta-nehisi. >> one thing that just occurred to me listening to this.

there are people with much more historical knowledge than me. being someone who does quite a bit of political analysis, i agree with the notion of a really brief historical memory. i think it was newt gingrich who said that, about 1860, which lends it this kind of intellectual veneer, that everything he says -- somehow when newt says it, it really means something. i wonder if part of this is not the price of ceding the historical memory to a certain section of the country. one of the things i noticed when again i started making my journey back into the civil war, is outside of people who are actual historians or writers, the civil war belongs, the public memory, to a certain group of people. and when you do that, the rest of the country says, okay, that's for them. that's not for us. i wonder about the implications of that. >> which is who? who does it belong to? >> who does it belong to? pretty much belongs to white southerners with confederate sensibilities. that's been my experience. i don't think that is, in fact, true. but whenever you visit the

battle parks, that's really the impression that you get, that it's really not for you, it's for another group of people. i thought it was just me as an african-american. the more i think about it, i think it is quite bigger than that. so i wonder if you decide that the historical memory isn't for you, how are you able to call upon it when you think about your current politics? >> steph? >> i read something you wrote about this that really struck me, that resonated with me. it has to do the with the problem i have feeling invested at all. it is extremely difficult to teach. you are supposed to think compromise is the desirable outcome. >> right. >> but how are you supposed to think that in 1860 -- >> who are you rooting for in 1860? >> you talked about the middle ground. the middle ground was upper south unionists who would have sold people into slavery into the indefinite future just like the people who joined the confederacy. it is hard to back them. they are the ones who are

bargaining with seward over shutting down the show so that there is no slavey and is going to give away the store. you know, he's going to give away the store. lincoln won't let him. so compromise is impossible. you have to feel that how could you morally back compromise in that particular context? you wrote about this a little bit when you were talking about how an african-american narrative of the civil war just kind of ruptures the story. and this is one of the main ways it ruptures the story. i can't really feel very comfortable with that story myself. they are not my guys. i don't really want them to win. compromise is not the solution in this case. any compromise in 18 -- there is no way that anybody understood a scenario in 1860 or 1861 by which slavery would have been eradicated in four years, uncompensated in total, except the scenario that we had -- war and state-sponsored emancipation. they only ever do it, doesn't matter what country it is, almost all these emancipations come when they want soldiers for the army.

so it is a military emancipation policy in the union and a military enlistment policy in the confederacy. i find the whole idea of the middle ground and a political compromise in 1860 just really deeply troubling. and it is very hard to write a narrative around that without disturbing that assumption. and once you disturb it, it is hard even to teach that period for that reason. >> do you think that's generational at all? just think back to the david donald generation, great civil war historian, started writing in the '40s, and was part of that generation that was wishing there had been more of a compromised culture. >> if only the politicians hadn't been so bumbling. >> yeah, i mean, david was trained by james randall, who was one of the needless war school leaders. >> blundering generation. >> blundering generation, yeah. but, i mean, as our

generation -- that's always a troubling phrase to use around anybody, isn't it? but let's just say people of our historical change as conflict. >> i certainly do. that's a yes on my part. >> okay. okay. andy? >> you know -- one can't disagree. this is -- i find myself in a -- difficult paradox. i guess it is the place that i choose to be. we make compro is mys all the time, right. we are compromising with all kinds of unconscionable behavior because of the clothes we wear, because we walk down the street as free people in a country where millions of people are incarcerated, in many cases, way beyond what thing any rational moral analysis would lead to us conclude they ought to me.

and there are people in this country who speak with just the same passion that stephanie spoke with. about other issues on which they feel that any kind of compromise is off to give away the moral ground completely now. we may not agree with them. on certain issues, such as abortion, i don't mean to presume what people think about that in this room. we have to recognize there are people in this country and there are fellow citizens, and they have the same free speech rights that we have, who believe that there are issues right now that we are blind to and that we are selling our souls by, not acting against. they may not, they may not be international issues, rather than national ones. but, you know -- i think we need to take the view seriously. it might help us to feel a little bit more how complicated it was to be an american in, in, not by 1860, but in the decade that led up to the situation of 1860.

>> even by 1860, there are hard truths we need to come to terms with, with the civil war era. one is, nobody is talking about a compromise relating to the institution of slavery itself. the place they're trying to compromise is on the extension of slavery. where the argument is. no one is arguing, beyond what would have been considered the abolitionist fringe is arguing for emancipation in 1860. what the civil war is an example of, how wars rage out of control. bring consequences no one could have anticipationed. end of slavery in four years. no one could have anticipated that. absolutely no one. the only reason it happens is because -- three million men take up arms and that makes many things possible. >> seems we have stumbled on, the general guidance, another, another legacy. which is, which is that the civil war experience frames both powerful impulse towards moral modesty about our passions and about our views and objectives

and political end. that's the lesson of, of robert penn warren's pragmatism. wilson's lesson from the war. i was teaching this morning, injured three times during the war, shot in the chest, shot in the neck. falls bluff, antetum in chancellor'sville and comes out of that experience. went into the war as one of the maybe, relatively few, abolitionists, officers, and comes out of the war convinced his moral passions, moral passions of the colleagues were foolish mistakes. so, it frames our moral modesty. >> the passion itself was the problem. >> that's right. it frames the passionate social projects that people have engaged in ever since. so the civil rights movement, borrows on the language of the abolitionists. the woman's right movement, borrows and we have all the social movements that organize themselves around the models of abolition as the one great, you

know, relatively, relatively pure. example of, extraordinary social reform in our country. but also we're called on to beep modest at the same time by the same events. >> i want to make an argument as to why savory is a little different. i think it's a particular kind of violence when you talk about the selling of people. the selling of people's children. the division of families. i think that's a little different than peta. we're talking about a compromise of two sides without power.

also i guess -- >> it's an ir ref tabl point. slightly fascinating to me that we've come to this topic. nothing i'm say iing, misunderstood by me or -- slave hold i holding or any kind of reduction in our sense of the heinousness of the crime of slavery. very difficult to go here, but, i once heard someone speak about comparative -- slavery, we have one of the great historians in the institution of slavery.

slavery is clearly one of the great crimes in the history of humanity, but there have been other great crimes. we didn't intervene. what we know, retrospectively, what we know about now, we didn't intervene and i think one of the answers today was questions about why the david donald generation was looking for compromise and middle ground. that was a policy of the 1940s and '50s. horrors -- lower scale about horrors that were being perpetrated against millions of people. we believes they would be eradicated. that's what lincoln believed. containment would lead to the end of slavery.

the policy drove the country to civil war and that unleashed the power that brought slavery to an end. i'm just a little uneasy about saying in retrospect, it was clear that military action was the only option and that we refrained from it ever since. >> in fact, american slavery was indeed in the end, a legend out of existence by great violence, of course. let me move out of combination of stephanie and gary's ideas. the story is powerful, why doesn't the con fedorasy.

you know, what -- what if it makes the narratives we draw from, so powerful, enduring, troubling and why is it more interesting? >> i think you and i learned something about this in jerusalem last summer. we were told that in the room repeatingly. we thought we were the outliars. to historians of other civil wars, we look crazily in love with our civil war. even as we're documenting and you know, historians of the

spanish civil war, the civil war in yugoslavia. who celebrating their civil war and re-enacts it? >> who puts robert e. lee on postage stamps. no other loser in the civil war who ended up on stamps. >> there are so many echoes of the civil war and political quarrels in our own time. you know, rick perry threatening succession, various kinds of nullification, you're just hearing these strange echoes of the old debates. >> norman miller of new york city wants succeed. so did the mayor of new york. >> so did the norwegian immigrants in the upper peninsula of michigan, too.